The Modern Language Association conference was held in Philadelphia last December ('06) and, as usual, the local newspaper feels obliged to cover it. Usually such stories devote most of the space to mockery at arcane, whacky paper topics and seem inevitably to have a jokey, anti-PC, anti-academic tone: how silly, all this. But this year the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a piece that catches nicely, I think, the sense of what we’re doing through the Writers House and CPCW, with the whole nexus of a university’s writing programs brought together, devoted to the art and practice of “contemporary writing” rather than splitting off modern and contemporary literature from composition from creative writing from a center for the writing arts (KWH). Add PENNsound to the mix and you've got what Charles Bernstein in the article is quoted as saying: an "interest[...] in these works as works of art," as made things. "People are interested in literature," says Marjorie Perloff, and "many of them are also writers." "We're in a phase right now where students was to study literature and to write. We're in a very literary moment," said Rosemary Feal, MLA's executive director, and "there is more emphasis on what writers do, reading what writers write, and if you want to be a writer, learning how to write." The full text of the article is here.
Sunday, July 08, 2007
writing actually as works of art
The Modern Language Association conference was held in Philadelphia last December ('06) and, as usual, the local newspaper feels obliged to cover it. Usually such stories devote most of the space to mockery at arcane, whacky paper topics and seem inevitably to have a jokey, anti-PC, anti-academic tone: how silly, all this. But this year the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a piece that catches nicely, I think, the sense of what we’re doing through the Writers House and CPCW, with the whole nexus of a university’s writing programs brought together, devoted to the art and practice of “contemporary writing” rather than splitting off modern and contemporary literature from composition from creative writing from a center for the writing arts (KWH). Add PENNsound to the mix and you've got what Charles Bernstein in the article is quoted as saying: an "interest[...] in these works as works of art," as made things. "People are interested in literature," says Marjorie Perloff, and "many of them are also writers." "We're in a phase right now where students was to study literature and to write. We're in a very literary moment," said Rosemary Feal, MLA's executive director, and "there is more emphasis on what writers do, reading what writers write, and if you want to be a writer, learning how to write." The full text of the article is here.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
